Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity

Abstract

In this article, I draw on Robert Merton's notion of role set theory and his corollary concept of sociological ambivalence as the background for examining a discursive conflict between prosecuting attorney and expert witness in a criminal trial. I hope to demonstrate how the participants display an orientation to ambivalent norms and counternorms in the situated details of interactional and embodied practices. Although these practices certainly do not yield a factual order in the orthodox Durkheimian sense, they do perform a multimodal integration of verbal and bodily conduct in the socio-cultural order as participants strive to articulate disturbances in the projected role set - as conflict in the discursive order is superimposed onto represented order. More specifically, rather than attack the expert's physiological theory, the prosecuting attorney attempts to impeach credibility on the grounds that he is an 'academic' rather than private physician. I examine not only how the prosecutor attacks the expert along the fault lines of this represented conflict but also how both participants contextualize legal identities and ground epistemological claims in the verbal and visual particulars of legal interaction.